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A weaned harbor seal pup was resting onshore when an untagged male sea otter approached it, grasped it with its teeth and forepaws, bit it on the nose, and flipped it over. The harbor seal moved toward the water with the sea otter following closely. Once in the water, the sea otter gripped the harbor seal’s head with its forepaws and repeatedly bit it on the nose, causing a deep laceration. The sea otter and pup rolled violently in the water for approximately 15 min, while the pup struggled to free itself from the sea otter’s grasp. Finally, the sea otter positioned itself dorsal to the pup’s smaller body while grasping it by the head and holding it underwater in a position typical of mating sea otters. As the sea otter thrust his pelvis, his penis was extruded and intromission was observed. At 105 min into the encounter, the sea otter released the pup, now dead, and began grooming. Thanks Jasmine.

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Matt Taibbi’s most recent Rolling Stonearticle unpacks one of last year’s most shocking bank cases in our era of “Too Big to Jail.” In December, HSBC was punished with a $1.9 billion settlement on drug laundering charges, the largest in American history, yet only five weeks worth of profits for the world’s third largest bank. U.S. Assistant Attorney Lanny Breuer was uncharacteristically candid when explaining why he refused to pursue criminal charges: “HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.” People were rightfully outraged when not a single HSBC banker went to jail for a decades’ worth of federal crimes, including money-laundering linked to drug cartels, terrorists and oppressive regimes. Taibbi dove deep into HSBC’s case and history, revealing that the bank’s crimes were even worst than we thought.

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An SS officer strode over and established they were all siblings from the Ovitz family. Immediately, the order went out: Wake the doctor! It was nearly midnight on Friday, May 19, 1944, and Dr Josef Mengele was asleep in his quarters. All the troopers on duty, however, were well aware of his passion for collecting human ‘freaks’, including hermaphrodites and giants. A lone dwarf wouldn’t have been sufficient reason to disturb his sleep, but a family — and seven of them — why, it was just like the fairy tale!

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Social media addiction has become an official condition. A clinic in London is treating more than 100 sufferers a year, with a professional footballer among those receiving counseling. A study last year by the University of Chicago suggested sites like Facebook are more addictive that alcohol and cigarettes.

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We’ve noted many times that when it comes to corporate media coverage of the so-called budget “sequester”–the immediate cuts to military and social spending set to hit in a matter of weeks–what matters most is what will happen to the military. The Washington Post had a whole piece (2/13/13) devoted to yet another round of complaints from military leaders–without a single comment from anyone who might take the view that cutting military spending would not be such a disaster.

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At around midday on Tuesday, the couple arrived to clean the house and found Dorner in an upstairs sitting room. His gun drawn, the suspect ordered them to stay calm. Mrs Reynolds ran down the stairs in a bid to escape, but Dorner caught her. He took the couple to a bedroom, where he made them lie on the floor, then bound their limbs with plastic zip-locks, gagged them with towels and covered their heads with pillowcases. “I thought we were dead,” Mr Reynolds said. The gunman repeatedly insisted, however, that he would not kill them. He revealed he had watched Mr Reynolds shovelling snow around the property in the preceding days, and told the couple he believed they were “hard-working, good people,” saying: “I don’t have a problem with you. I just want to clear my name.”

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Parent says West Sabine staff out of line after feces found

“My kid came home and he said, he told me that he had been inspected, his butt had been inspected at the elementary school for feces,” Little said. “And I asked him, I got to ask him about it and he said he was embarrassed by the whole situation.” Feces had been found on the gym floor at least five times during or after PE Class. It first happened last year only with this particular class of children, said principal Deborah Lane. Lane says she asked the children numerous times who was responsible. She even gave them lectures on germs and the dangers of e-coli. This last time, she requested the school nurse search for feces in the Tiger cubs’ pants. Accounts of how the search was conducted differ. “The school nurse basically pulled their pants out or down.”

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Facebook didn’t pay any federal or state income taxes last year and will receive a hefty tax refund, according to a recent report. How did the social network manage to swing such a nice tax break? Well, according to the Citizen for Tax Justice report the company benefited from the tax deductability of executive stock options, which reduced all of its income taxes by $1.03 billion in 2012. The company also has another $2.17 billion in extra tax-option breaks to carry forward in the future, according to the report, which means Facebook gets to deduct a total of more than $3 billion in current and future taxes, according to the report.

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One reason is that a freshly discovered weakness in a popular piece of software, known in the trade as a “zero-day” vulnerability because the software makers have had no time to develop a fix, can be cashed in for much more than a reputation boost and some free drinks at the bar. Information about such flaws can command prices in the hundreds of thousands of dollars from defense contractors, security agencies and governments. This trade in zero-day exploits is poorly documented, but it is perhaps the most visible part of a new industry that in the years to come is likely to swallow growing portions of the U.S. national defense budget, reshape international relations, and perhaps make the Web less safe for everyone. Zero-day exploits are valuable because they can be used to sneak software onto a computer system without detection by conventional computer security measures, such as antivirus packages or firewalls. Criminals might do that to intercept credit card numbers. An intellige…

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On a scale of one to 10, you probably think you’re a seven. And you wouldn’t be alone. While it’s impossible for most people to be above the median for a specific quality, people think they are better than most people in many arenas, from charitable behavior to work performance. The phenomenon, known as illusory superiority, is so stubbornly persistent that psychologists would be surprised if it didn’t show up in their studies, said David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell who has studied the effect for decades. It happens for many reasons: Others are too polite to say what they really think, incompetent people lack the skills to assess their abilities accurately, and such self-delusions can actually protect people’s mental health, Dunning told LiveScience. Since psychological studies first began, people have given themselves top marks for most positive traits. While most people do well at assessing others, they are wildly positive about their own abilities, Dunning said.

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When the woman Tiffany Stanton Johnson, 25, arrived home and spoke to an officer on the scene, she stated that she had left her three children home alone to go shopping at Kmart. While speaking to the woman, the officer allegedly saw her son behind her playing with a crack rock, according to the complaint. At this, Johnson was forced to admit that she sells crack cocaine. After giving a consent search, the officer found a can with 12 grams of crack cocaine packaged for sale.

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“A funny comparison is if you take the biggest ungulate herd — so that would be bison, antelope, deer and elk — in Yellow Stone National Park, per meter squared — so per unit area — the fish on one of the reefs that I look at…they actually pee more than three times more [than that herd],” he said. Fish urine even dwarfs fertilizer-heavy golf course runoff — per meter squared — in nutrient content. Luke Joseph, a freshman biology major from Augusta, said he wouldn’t have guessed fish pee had so much to do with nutrient cycling. “That’s pretty cool,” he said. “I guess that means aquaponics might be a good way to grow things.”

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Turk appears in a YouTube video by White Trash Clan titled “My World is Blue” dancing in a blue tutu and fairy wings and carrying a wand. She blows pixie dust at the camera and mimes drug use. The video, posted in July 2012, shows people dancing in parking lots and pharmacies with giant cutouts of blue pills and rhapsodizing about prescription drug abuse: “I can stop when I want to / I’m not addicted / I don’t take pills / crush and sniff it / Blue is my world in this life how I live it / Come out to Staten Island, pay a little visit.”

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If there were a celebrity among brain chemicals, it would be dopamine. Supposedly released whenever we experience something pleasurable, it’s forever linked to salacious stories of sex, drugs and wild partying in the popular press. The Kim Kardashian of neurotransmitters, it gives instant appeal to listless reporting and gives editors an excuse to drop some booty on the science pages. There are too many bad examples to mention in detail, but I have some favourites. The Sun declared that “cupcakes could be as addictive as cocaine” because they apparently cause “a surge of the reward chemical dopamine to hit the decision-making area of the brain”. The article was topped off with a picture of Katy Perry, apparently a “cupcake fan” and, presumably, dangerously close to spiralling into a life of frosted-sponge addiction.

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The government is considering introducing internet filters, such as those used to block China off form the worldwide web, in order to stop Icelanders downloading or viewing pornography on the internet. The unprecedented censorship is justified by fears about damaging effects of the internet on children and women. Ogmundur Jonasson, Iceland’s interior minister, is drafting legislation to stop the access of online pornographic images and videos by young people through computers, games consoles and smartphones. “We have to be able to discuss a ban on violent pornography, which we all agree has a very harmful effects on young people and can have a clear link to incidences of violent crime,” he said.

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Miss Sanborn tells us that an eccentric gentleman, having taken a fancy to see a large party of noseless persons, invited every one thus afflicted, whom he met in the streets, to dine on a certain day at a tavern, where he formed them into a brotherhood.

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Russian Meteorite Pictures & Video

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Since sex usually occurs in water, it doesn’t tend to preserve well. But in one four-hundred-million-year-old silica-rich deposit local changes in pH remobilized some of the silica, leaving behind thin films of the original organic material. In the specimen the chert beautifully preserved the plant’s delicate archegonium (from goni, Hindi for ‘sack,’ akin to yoni, Sanskrit for ‘vagina’) — the female sex organ. Another sample of rock, sliced thin and observed with a microscope, shows Aglaphyton’s antheridium, its male sex organ — filled with sperm cells ready to explode. Here, preserved by chance, with neither compromised actors nor moral qualm, is a geographic equivalent of the ‘money shot’ of pornographic films — an ejaculation event 140,000 times older than Homer’s Odyssey, 400 times older than the human species, and almost as old as the appearance of animals in the fossil record.

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Does this make you wonder how much footage from prominent world events is actually digitally created to assist in advancing a dark agenda? How much fake news are we being fed? Dictators, terrorists, riots, revolution beamed into our living rooms as part of on-going psychological warfare against the masses? Is this a conventional war of tanks and guns and bombs in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya or is it really all part of a sustained psychological war on the minds of every single person on the planet who watches television? Our advise? Stop watching mass media news. There’s nothing good for us there!

I’m proud to present my latest creation: The Hammer! The Hammer is a prototype test-your-strength game that’s an insertable, muscle-controlled, light-up dildo.

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We asked the 61% of Facebook users who have taken a break from using the site to tell us in their own words why they did so, and they mentioned a variety of reasons. The largest group (21%) said that their “Facebook vacation” was a result of being too busy with other demands or not having time to spend on the site. Others pointed toward a general lack of interest in the site itself (10% mentioned this in one way or another), an absence of compelling content (10%), excessive gossip or “drama” from their friends (9%), or concerns that they were spending too much time on the site and needed to take a break (8%).

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Learn why your favorite social network – Facebook – is actually bad. All the political and technical reasons you need to understand why you should consider deleting your Facebook account and how to do it.

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Facebook has shown no respect for its users privacy. The site notoriously makes it difficult to understand who you are sharing what with, and has been known to reset privacy settings to defaults without notifying users. Defaults which share everything. Facebook tracks your usage of the web and knows pretty much everything else about your life. Facebook supports CISPA, and why wouldn’t they? It gives them a free pass to give your data to anyone. SOPA and PIPA didn’t. A service that knows everything about you, even things you don’t want it to, supports legislation that would allow it to give anyone that information without recourse – sounds great doesn’t it?

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“This lawsuit is about preserving the integrity and legacy of a man who has spent years working hard at his musical craft and has earned the position of one of the greatest musical entertainers of all time,” said Gary. “We cannot sit idly and watch as technology giants or anyone else exploits the name or likeness of an innocent person with the goal of making millions of dollars,” he added. “The defendants have marketed Chubby Checker’s name on their product to gain a profit and this just isn’t right.” The “Chubby Checker” app, which appears on websites for Palm devices, claims to allow a person to determine a man’s penis size by using his shoe size.

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“I think my neighbors on their way to church see the buckets and stuff and think we’ve got a meth lab operation going on here. I just want to put their minds at ease, and let them know it’s maple syrup. And that they’re all welcome for pancakes if they want to come on over.”

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About two years ago, bath salts — a lab-brewed drug that unpredictably mimics a freakish combination of coke, meth, and Ecstasy — suddenly popped into public consciousness with a rat-tat-tat of reports from emergency rooms and law-enforcement officials that sounded like the stuff of a D.A.R.E. officer’s most florid nightmare. By most accounts, the drug — then legal — first surfaced in Louisiana in mid-2010, quickly moved through the South, and then spread out in all directions. It was, in fact, in Louisiana where one of the first Code Red warnings about bath salts emerged, when a user lost her arm and part of her shoulder after she shot herself up and sparked a flesh-eating bacteria.

The argument that machines speak was first made in the context of Internet search. In 2003, in a civil suit brought by a firm dissatisfied with the ranking of Google’s search results, Google asserted that its search results were constitutionally protected speech. (In an unpublished opinion, the court ruled in Google’s favor.) And this year, facing increasing federal scrutiny, Google commissioned Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, to draft a much broader and more elaborate version of the same argument. As Professor Volokh declares in his paper: “Google, Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo! Search, and other search engines are speakers.”

Back in October, the New York Times made substantial changes to a report about Occupy Wall Street protesters marching over the Brooklyn Bridge. Version one opened with: “After allowing them onto the bridge, the police cut off and arrested dozens of demonstrators.” Version two, edited just 20 minutes later, opened: “In a tense showdown above the East River, the police arrested more than 700 demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street protests who took to the roadway as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday afternoon.”

AMERICA’S DANGEROUS LOVE AFFAIR WITH COUNTERINSURGENCY At the beginning of this year one of the weirdest characters ever to become involved in the present Afghan war died. He was called Jack Idema and he was a brilliant con-man. For a moment, during the early part of the war, Idema persuaded all the major TV networks and scores of journalists that he was some kind of special forces super-hero who was using all kinds of “black ops” to track down and arrest the terrorists. In reality, before 2001, Idema had been running a hotel for pets in North Carolina called The Ultimate Pet Resort. He had been in prison for fraud, and had tried to con journalists before about being some kind of super-spy.

US Bank closed its branch in the UC Davis Memorial Union Building in March. The sit-down protests were a success. That such effective protest cannot be tolerated is evident from the response of the University administration and the Yolo County District Attorney. The charges against the Davis Dozen have a notable history of service: “Obstructing movement in a public place” was an indictment invented to criminalise homelessness in Alabama. The Davis Dozen are to learn – on behalf of everyone affected by austerity – that protest against the conditions which lead to homelessness is criminalised by the same legislation that makes homelessness illegal. For the bankers, millionaire University administrators and state functionaries for whom “revenue” is to be maximised no matter what the cost to the people they serve, this paradox is no paradox at all.

You are not a bastion of self-control. Everyone has a set amount of the stuff, and when life saps it, people can break. Now fMRIs from a University of Iowa study show exactly what it looks like when that happens. The anterior cingulate cortex usually sends up the red flag when a situation requires self-control. It goes at a steady rate as long as it needs to. But the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which actually manages self-control, fires less and less the more it does its job. In other words, people know when they’re giving in, they just have a hard time doing anything about it after a while.

Last month, a “senior administration official” said the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under President Obama is in the “single digits.” But last year “U.S. officials” said drones in Pakistan killed about 30 civilians in just a yearlong stretch under Obama. Both claims can’t be true.

Most kids are taught that values such as hard work, persistence, and dedication will put them on a path to success. But that is reportedly not William Abreu’s philosophy. The assistant principal at Progress HS for Professional Careers in Bushwick allegedly told a female student hoping to secure a summer job that all you have to do, really, is suck some balls. Preferably his balls. “Would you suck my b—s for me? That’s the things [sic] you have to do to succeed,” he allegedly told one of the teenage girls. “You have to come to work looking sexy, so I can see how pretty you are.” According to an investigation, Abreu did not limit his career advice to just one girl, because he cares about everyone’s future: The report by the Special Commissioner of Investigation says Abreu asked a second girl about her bedroom habits with her boyfriend, and suggested she could stay a virgin by having only anal sex.

The Internet will become a religion, in part because everything will happen on it, including all other religions, but mostly because it will be the first platform for true otherness to appear on the planet. Not other as in other variety of human or other variety of animal, but other as in Other, an agent not like us yet bigger than us. A true alien being. Of which we are part.

A new Louisiana law requires sex offenders and child predators to state their criminal status on their Facebook or other social networking page, with the law’s author saying the bill is the first of its kind in the nation. Thanks Jasmine

Eagle-eyed viewers who saw the report on Sunday immediately identified the mystery mushroom as a double-headed masturbation toy with an artificial vagina on one side and an artificial anus on the other. Yes, you read that right, it was a jack-off aid that some guy used to spank his monkey when he wasn’t getting it from his wife.

Every year around this time, mysterious electric blue clouds appear over the North and South pole. They are called noctilucent clouds and they can only be seen in deep twilight, when the Sun is below the horizon. According to NASA, “their origin is still largely a mystery”: Various theories associate them with meteoric dust, rocket exhaust, global warming—or some mixture of the three. They are the highest clouds, located almost on the edge of space at 54 miles (85 kilometers) from the Earth’s surface, in the mesosphere. They are very difficult to observe, but they appear as white and blue tendrils when they are illuminated by the Sun and the rest of the atmosphere is in our planet’s shadow.

The number of earned PhD degrees in the United States is 40,000 to 45,000 each year. The number of fake PhDs bought each year from diploma mills exceeds 50,000. In other words, more than half of all people claiming a new PhD have a fake degree. • Fake medical degrees are an urgent problem. It is easy to buy a medical degree from a fake school, or a counterfeit diploma in the name of a real school. Twenty-five years ago, a Congressional committee calculated that there were over 5,000 fake doctors in the United States, and there are many more now. People have died because of these fakes. • The Government Accountability Office looked for fake degrees among employees of less than 5 percent of federal agencies and found enough to suggest that more than one hundred thousand federal employees have at least one, many of them paid for by taxpayers not to mention resulting higher pay and increased retirement benefits.

Prescription painkillers have topped car accidents as the leading cause of accidental death in the U.S., according to a new report. Research by the National Center for Health Statistics show that drug poisoning is now a more common way to go than being killed on the road. It follows recent celebrity deaths from painkillers, including Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger and Anna Nicole Smith.

Urinating on a jellyfish sting can make it worse, according to Jennifer Ping, an emergency medicine physician at Straub Clinic and Hospital in Honolulu, who has studied the most effective treatments for dealing with jellyfish stings. About 15 people per year check in to her hospital’s emergency room after being stung by jellyfish. Jellyfish stings are caused by contact with a jellyfish tentacle, which can trigger millions of stinging cells (nematocytes) to pierce the skin and inject venom, Ping says.

Among mammals, only a very few species live in seemingly monogamous arrangements, and fewer still maintain sexual fidelity within those relationships. Man certainly does not seem to be one of them. There is increasing evidence that many men are not biologically or psychologically disposed to sexual monogamy. When one considers the seeming universality of the expectation of monogamy in today’s world (or at least the world presented by Western media), it is perhaps surprising that monogamy has not always been the expected state for man. Despite the vehemence with which many Christians defend monogamy, many men in the Bible, including David and Solomon, were far from monogamous. In fact, whenever conservative marriage advocates espouse “traditional marriage,” I always have to laugh – even in Christianity, traditional marriage included polygyny (a marriage arrangement with one man and multiple wives), and was not explicitly limited to a monogamous arrangement between “one man and one woman”

As the consolidated corporate media machine fails in its function as the fourth estate, citizen journalists and independent press outlets are there to pick up the slack. But this important task is becoming increasingly threatened by the harsh treatment at the hands of the police force. Citizen based media is often targeted by police for reporting unfiltered truths, or they are lumped together with activists/protesters and beaten or arrested. As more and more Americans choose alternative news sources to find out what is really happening in their country, harassing those providing first hand reports muzzles the free flow of information and poses a threat to democracy.

In a startling new theory, scientists have predicted that the passage of time will stop altogether. The theory is based on research conducted at two Spanish Universities aimed at explaining why the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating, a conundrum that has puzzled scientists for years. What they came up with was the notion that the expansion of the universe isn’t accelerating at all; instead time itself is slowing down at an imperceptible rate and that eventually it will stop entirely, resulting in a perpetual static snapshot for the rest of eternity.

A Florida teacher was arrested on child abuse charges after allegedly encouraging her students to cut and burn themselves in order to rid their bodies of evil spirits. Danielle Harkins, 35, allegedly brought seven teens to a spot by the pier in St. Petersburg on Saturday, and began the strange religious ritual by starting a small fire, police told WTSP News. The teacher then told the teens to cut themselves to cast out demons lurking in their bodies, and cauterize the wounds to prevent the spirits from returning, investigators said. “There was apparently some chanting and then dancing around this fire that was taking place,” St. Petersburg Police Department spokesman Mike Puetz told Fox Tampa Bay. Two kids were cut, and one sustained second-degree burns after the teacher allegedly poured perfume on his wound and lit it with a cigarette lighter, investigators told WTSP. One of them was cut in the neck with a broken bottle and the wound was cauterized with a heated-up house key

When she appeared in court on Monday, several local witches and warlocks showed up to support her — something her attorney noted to the judge. Salem has been a hotbed for Wiccans and other people who practice pagan religions because of the 1692 and 1693 which trials there, which saw Puritanical settlers execute 28 people suspected of practicing witchcraft. Griffin’s uncle, Christian Day, posted on Facebook asking a friend to ‘send him energy’ to help his niece. ‘I need to hex each and every person that would dare harm her,’ he wrote. ‘I call upon everything in the heavens and hells to both protect her and to strike down anyone who would capitalize on this tragedy for their own gain.’

Add to the list of things robots now do better than humans: feel. Researchers at the U. of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering have designed a robot finger that can outperform humans in the basic yet complex sensory task of touching. Their robot finger, equipped with a novel tactile sensor technology, is better at identifying and distinguishing between different materials and textures than human beings are.

The last time the FCC updated its guidelines for radiation-exposure was in 1996. Some experts say the review is long overdue. The current standards are based on behavioral research conducted on animals in the 1980s. Henry Lai, a researcher and professor at the University of Washington, who has conducted studies on the biological effects of cell phone radiation, told CNET a year ago for an article published about the SAR standard that more than 60 studies in the last decade have shown biological changes to cells at SAR levels less than the current safety standard allowed by the FCC and the FDA.

This spring the Chronicle of Higher Education offered an in-depth look at the number of highly educated people receiving federal aid. Though, on average, they are still doing better than people without college degrees, these populations have not been immune to the recession.

According to a letter seen by TorrentFreak, Google are threatening action against one of the web’s largest YouTube conversion sites. The site, which according to Google’s own stats is pulling in 1.3 million visitors every day, extracts MP3 audio from YouTube videos and makes it available for users to download. Google’s lawyers say this must stop, and have given the site seven days to comply.

WhoSampled.com’s vast database has long been a source for music geeks to identify where their favorite samples came from, but now it’s coming to your smartphone too. Wired U.K. The WhoSampled iPhone app scans your music library and automatically shows you all the samples, covers and remixes associated with all of the artists and tracks in it. Plus, if you’re listening to a song and you want to access its data immediately, you can switch to the WhoSampled app from your music player and it’ll display all the musical connections for whatever’s playing.

Breast milk is starting to look like a potent HIV-fighter. An unknown component of breast milk appears to kill HIV particles and virus-infected cells, as well as blocking HIV transmission in mice with a human immune system.

The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) said Tuesday that it expects to add 26 new synthetic drugs to its list of temporary Schedule I substances, an emergency authority that’s used to control little-known, poorly researched new substances that the agency feels pose a threat to public health. In the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act, passed by the Senate in May and reconciled by the House last night, Congress agreed to expand the DEA’s authority to control such substances by fiat, expanding the time they can temporarily ban a new drug from 18 to 36 months. Congress also set up an explicit framework for identifying “similar chemical compounds” that produce the same or similar effects on humans as any other Schedule I substance.

Nine male students were suspended from Bell Middle School for allegedly masturbating while looking at pornography on their cell phones during English class. Students were suspended during the month of May, the district confirmed in an e-mail to NBC San Diego. But the email also states, the district is “prohibited from commenting on confidential student or personnel matters.” The teacher, Ed Johnson, is reportedly under fire because he did not respond to students who told him about the behavior while it was allegedly happening – only saying he would give students referrals if he caught them – then went on reading at his desk. Following the incident, there are reports of controversy from the faculty over how the situation was handled by the teacher. Students who knew about the suspensions told NBC San Diego that their behavior was “nasty” and “disgusting.”

An extraordinary condition that ballooned Wesley Warren Jr.’s scrotum to a massive 100 pounds made him feel like “a freak,” and the Las Vegas man set off on a campaign to raise $1 million for corrective surgery. But given the chance to have the surgery — even at no cost — the 47-year-old remains reluctant to go under the knife, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Monday. If anything, Warren’s new-found fame may have gone to his head, according to the newspaper, which said he appears to be enjoying his celebrity status. “I’ll make a decision when I’m ready,” Warren said.

The video hit the Internet on Wednesday. It shows a man walking up to the original 1929 Pablo Picasso masterpiece inside the Menil Collection in Montrose. He is then seen using a stencil to spray-paint the word “conquista,” which is Spanish for “couquer” on the painting before taking off. The man who took the video did not want to be identified. He said he confronted the man after he witnessed him spray-paint it and asked him why he did it. According to the witnesses, the vandal said he was an up-and-coming artist and he did it to honor Picasso’s work. “I just thought it was pretty cool how he just went up to the painting without fear, spray painted it and just walked off,” the witness told Local 2. Thanks Jasmine

RNCLatinos.com features as its main image a stock photo from Shutterstock, which tags the photo with keywords that clearly suggest the kids are Asian, including: “asia,” “asian,” “interracial,” “japanese,” and “thailand.” We’re guessing the RNC may have taken inspiration from Sharron Angle, who in 2010 told Hispanic children they looked Asian. When the RNC launched the site in October, the committee described it as a place where the “Republican National Committee can connect with Hispanic voters, and Hispanic voters can hear Hispanic Republican leaders.”

Hot dogs and pizza. Bacon and ice cream — who says these tasty treats don’t go great together? Despite the fact that the prevalence of obesity in England has more than doubled in the last twenty five years, Pizza Hut UK has rolled out a pizza with a Hot Dog Stuffed Crust. Described as a “succulent hot dog sausage bursting from our famous stuffed crust,” the overstuffed pizza base is available across the pond for delivery with a “free mustard drizzle.”

✖ Brazil cult members arrested for cannibalism

Brazilian police announced Friday that they had arrested a man and two women on suspicion of having murdered and cannibalized at least two women in what was described as a purification ritual. The three defendants formed a sect called “Cartel” that seeks to purify the world and reduce the population, police spokesman Democrito Honorato from the northeastern Brazilian town of Guaranhuns told AFP.

This chaotic video shows a reporter getting yogurt and eggs thrown at him by some angry protesters on live TV. You’re probably wondering how the protesters got in the studio to begin with. Well, being Greek and having been to Greece on several occasions, I can safely guess that the security guards were most likely on their eighth smoke break of the day while the protesters snuck in behind their backs.

Thanks to Objectum Sexuality, the Statue of Liberty now has a lover, a three foot model the Greek God Adonis has a girlfriend and the Eiffel Tower has a wife, as does the Berlin Wall. What sounds completely bizarre to us is in fact normal to these four women who suffer from the psychological condition that makes them experience romantic feelings towards inanimate objects. Let’s delve a little deeper into their stories of love.

This is the 19-year-old girl who has eaten nothing but Margherita pizza for the past eight years. Sophie Ray, from Wrexham, Wales, has not had a proper meal since she was two, and from the age of 11 she has subsisted solely on cheese and tomato pizza. The teenager says she now gags if she touches anything but the takeaway meal, and even a slice of pepperoni is enough to turn her stomach.

A WOMAN who has eaten only cheese and tomato pizza for 31 years has been told she could DIE unless she quits her bizarre dining habit. Mature student Claire Simmons, 33, gags if she puts anything but a plain pizza slice in her mouth. She also SHAKES the moment she is presented with any other type of food. Now doctors have warned that her bizarre condition — known as Selective Eating Disorder — is increasing her risk of a stroke or heart attack in later life.

“As alleged, these six defendants operated a veritable pill mill,” said Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York. “The charged conduct was especially dangerous, as the defendants potentially victimized young children whose unsuspecting parents sent them to a day care center that allegedly doubled as a warehouse for thousands of their illegal pills.”

If your a girl in college you’ve found a great place to offer some GF services. You can offer what we call ‘flings’ to boys. An example of a fling would be offer to do a boys homework for money, sending him a text message about how much fun you had last night and how great he was in bed for the boy to punk his friends, changing your Facebook relationship status for $5 a day, offer to leave a few ‘girlfriend like’ wall comments on his facebook wall for $5 to make him feel special. The possibilites are endless. Boys can suggest flings on our home page and girls can see these ideas when they create a fling. To make sure you get paid we take the money from the boy when he orders your fling, when your flings duration is over with we then allow you to send it to your PayPal account. You can get your ex-gf back from that asshole by making her jelous. We offer categories that make it simple for guys to choose their ideal fake facebook girlfriend.

Offensive signs have been showing up some King County Metro buses. The signs, which look official and cite a state code, warn passengers, “Gang rape is strictly prohibited.” King County Metro’s Linda Thielke is aware of the signs and says the county has nothing to do with them. According to Thielke, the signs are likely the work of a prankster with a computer design program and too much time on their hands.

On November 13, 2010, 34-year old Jacksonville, Florida resident Christopher Chaney went hunting for unreleased nude photos of celebrities. According to court documents, he had the e-mail address for celebrity stylist and handbag designer Simone Harouche, but he didn’t have Harouche’s password. No matter; after connecting to Apple’s e-mail servers, Chaney used the password reset feature. He answered the required security questions by supplying publicly available information gleaned from the Internet—and he was in. What to do next?

A relatively monstrous SWAT style truck leads us to a whole new blob of police state developments, busy hands with little to do and a lot of hardware to do it. It’s yet another plateau of mad new security bureaucracy, something in this case I was loosely aware of tectonic plates moving, but a little digging revealed quite a nasty new nucleus. Let’s plow in and see what was beta-tested through the willingness of politicians to throw money at repressing immigrants. The results begin with big, black scary trucks. And the biggest intelligence group inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and more. Surprise!

Eiserman said a police officer was on routine patrol Friday when he pulled Woods over for a broken rear light and found marijuana in his car. When the officer searched Woods before placing him in the police cruiser, he discovered “a large bulge” in the front of his pants, Eiserman said. Story continues below. Police say Woods actually had the cojones to deny that he had any contraband down there. “He stopped him for the traffic violation, and one thing led to another,” Eiserman said. At the station, Eiserman said, police discovered that Woods had tied a large plastic bag around his penis that contained 89 small bags of suspected heroin and cocaine. Then things got messy. “I tried to remove it. Unfortunately, and I don’t know if it was nervousness or not, but he started urinating all over,” Eiserman said.

A rule change that would allow transgender women to participate in the Miss Universe beauty pageant next year is a step forward for equality, advocates said Tuesday after pageant officials announced the policy shift. Pageant officials said they are working on the language of the official rule policy change but expected final word to come soon. The rules will have to be approved by Donald Trump, who runs the Miss Universe Organization, and NBC. Trump and NBC co-own the contest. The announcement of the policy change comes a week after the organization decided to allow Vancouver’s Jenna Talackova to compete for Canada’s spot in the Miss Universe pageant this year. Talackova, 23, underwent a sex change four years ago after being born a male.

Those restrictions, represented most clearly in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), were initially supported by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who reportedly sent a letter to the Chamber of Commerce expressing solidarity with that bill’s ultimate goals. But as the Internet backlash began and a growing number of major websites joined a mass work stoppage protest earlier this year, the company insisted to reporters it had been “neutral” on the matter all along. This year, however, the company would seem to have compelling reason to join the fray at the level of their advancing competitors at Time Warner and Comcast. Both cable network operators have been angling to compete with Netflix by launching their own on-demand video services, along with implementing some policies like bandwidth caps that impose a monthly data limit, which limits the amount of time some users can spend watching streaming video on sites like Netflix.

LaMarcus D. Ramsey, 20, was in Autauga County Circuit Court to enter a plea on a charge of receiving stolen property. Circuit Judge John Bush took exception to the fact that Ramsey’s blue jeans were sagging too low. The three-day stint will be served in the Autauga Metro jail. “You are in contempt of court because you showed your butt in court,” a visibly irate Bush told Ramsey. “You can spend three days in jail. When you get out you can buy pants that fit, or at least get a belt to hold up your pants so your underwear doesn’t show.”

Nicholas Merrill is planning to revolutionize online privacy with a concept as simple as it is ingenious: a telecommunications provider designed from its inception to shield its customers from surveillance. Merrill, 39, who previously ran a New York-based Internet provider, told CNET that he’s raising funds to launch a national “non-profit telecommunications provider dedicated to privacy, using ubiquitous encryption” that will sell mobile phone service and, for as little as $20 a month, Internet connectivity. The ISP would not merely employ every technological means at its disposal, including encryption and limited logging, to protect its customers. It would also — and in practice this is likely more important — challenge government surveillance demands of dubious legality or constitutionality.

Wiretaps cost hundreds of dollars per target every month, generally paid at daily or monthly rates. To wiretap a customer’s phone, T-Mobile charges law enforcement a flat fee of $500 per target. Sprint’s wireless carrier Sprint Nextel requires police pay $400 per “market area” and per “technology” as well as a $10 per day fee, capped at $2,000. AT&T; charges a $325 activation fee, plus $5 per day for data and $10 for audio. Verizon charges a $50 administrative fee plus $700 per month, per target. Data requests for voicemail or text messages cost extra. AT&T; demands $150 for access to a target’s voicemail, while Verizon charges $50 for access to text messages. Sprint offers the most detailed breakdown of fees for various kinds of data on a phone, asking $120 for pictures or video, $60 for email, $60 for voice mail and $30 for text messages.

A new study by researchers at Loyola University suggests that the common notion that human urine is sterile is not always true. A post at the science blog Lab Spaces says that tests have shown that certain bacteria commonly inhabit the bladders of some women, and that new approaches to testing for and treating urinary tract infections (UTIs) are in order.

New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week. Further, NASA doesn’t need a human expedition to Mars to nail down the claim, neuropharmacologist and biologist Joseph Miller, with the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, told Discovery News. “The ultimate proof is to take a video of a Martian bacteria. They should send a microscope — watch the bacteria move,” Miller said. “On the basis of what we’ve done so far, I’d say I’m 99 percent sure there’s life there,” he added.

Privacy is eroding fast as technology offers government increasing ways to track and spy on citizens. The Washington Post reported there are 3,984 federal, state and local organizations working on domestic counterterrorism. Most collect information on people in the US. Here are thirteen examples of how some of the biggest government agencies and programs track people.

I thought it might be fun to offer a little context for this map (below), which has been making the rounds at Reddit and FlowingData. It shows Sweden and Finland with a fairly massive lead in metal bands per capita. Northern Europe and Scandinavia do well across board with Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and tiny Estonia besting the U.S. and U.K. by a considerable margin, as our colleagues at The Atlantic Wire have noted.

It has emerged that Michigan State Police have been using a high-tech mobile forensics device that can extract information from over 3,000 models of mobile phone, potentially grabbing all media content from your iPhone in under two minutes. The CelleBrite UFED is a handheld device that Michigan officers have been using since August 2008 to copy information from mobile phones belonging to motorists stopped for minor traffic violations. The device can circumvent password restrictions and extract existing, hidden, and deleted phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, images, and geotags. O2MOBILE SOFTWARE Cellebrite UFED 520×286 US Police Can Copy Your iPhones Contents In Under Two MinutesIn short, it can copy everything on your smartphone in a matter of minutes.

The reality is that there is no evidence whatsoever that the Jews were ever enslaved in Egypt. Yes, there’s the story contained within the bible itself, but that’s not a remotely historically admissible source. I’m talking about real proof; archeological evidence, state records and primary sources. Of these, nothing exists.

One of the most fascinating documents we came across was the BPD’s subpoena of Philip Markoff’s Facebook information. It’s interesting for a number of reasons — for one thing, Facebook has been pretty tight-lipped about the subpoena process, even refusing to acknowledge how many subpoenas they’ve served. Social-networking data is a contested part of a complicated legal ecosystem — in some cases, courts have found that such data is protected by the Stored Communications Act. In fact, we’d never seen an executed Facebook subpoena before — but here we have one, including the forms that Boston Police filed to obtain the information, and the printed (on paper!) response that Facebook sent back, which includes text printouts of Markoff’s wall posts, photos he uploaded as well as photos he was tagged in, a comprehensive list of friends with their Facebook IDs (which we’ve redacted), and a long table of login and IP data.

Eddie and I were in separate observation rooms, which were more like jail cells, as we awaited our respective criminal cases to be dealt with by the court. I was under a 24-hour per day suicide watch all the while I was confined there. A New York City correction officer was posted outside my room continually with each officer doing an eight hour shift. And Eddie was housed in a three man room almost directly across from me, and about ten feet away. Most of the time the guards allowed Ed and I to talk. Eddie’s case also graced the newspapers, at least for a few days. He was caught robbing from graves in a local cemetery. He told me he was a Satanist. And, if I remember correctly, he knew certain persons who were interested in purchasing his wares in order to use them for ritualistic purposes. But who these people were, I’ve no idea. And I think it was one of Ed’s friends who tipped off the police.

✖ Japan is Poisoning Other Countries By Burning Highly-Radioactive Debris

Burning radioactive debris does not destroy the radioactivity. It merely spreads it. Gundersen says that radioactivity from the burnt debris will end up not only in neighboring prefectures, but in Hawaii, British Columbia, Oregon, Washington and California. Gundersen said that burning radioactive debris is basically re-creating the Fukushima disaster all over again, as it is releasing a huge amount of radioactivity which had settled on the ground back into the air.

The latest such high-profile example of this comes from Cheltenham, England, where a 14-year-old boy has been arrested after posting to Facebook a brief clip of himself and a 14-year-old girl engaging in an unspecified sex act (it’s unclear if it was just a clip or whether the whole thing lasted just a few pumps). The sex was consensual, all parties agree. The boy got off … lightly. Rather than ruin the mini-pornographer’s life with the scarlet letter of the sex offender registry, police gave him a “final warning,” which means it’ll all be expunged from his record in six years, barring any additional indecent incident.

A 9,500-year-old bracelet has been analysed using the very latest computers – and the results show that it is so intricate even today’s craftsmen would struggle to improve it. Researchers from the Institut Français d’Etudes Anatoliennes in Istanbul and Laboratoire de Tribologie et de Dynamiques des Systèmes studied the bracelet’s surface and its micro-topographic features revealing the astounding technical expertise of the maker. The bracelet is obsidian – which means it’s made from volcanic glass – and the researchers analysis of it sheds new light on Neolithic societies, which remain highly mysterious.

For the first time in nearly a century, automobile accidents are no longer the nation’s leading cause of accidental deaths, according to a major report released Tuesday by the National Center for Health Statistics. The new number one killer is drugs—not smack, crystal meth or any other stepped-on menace sold in urban alleyways or trailer parks, but bright, shiny pills prescribed by doctors, approved by the government, manufactured by pharmaceutical companies and sold to the consumer as “medicine.” Yet of the billions of legit pills Americans pop every year for medical conditions serious and otherwise, the vast majority of lives are claimed by only a select few classes—painkillers, sedatives and stimulants—that all share a common characteristic: they promote abuse, dependence and addiction.

A Spanish model’s plan to smuggle cocaine into Italy concealed in her prosthetic breasts and buttocks backfired Wednesday when her extra curvy figure drew the wrong kind of attention from ogling customs officials. The 33 year old deliberately wore tight-fitting clothes when she arrived on a flight at Rome’s Fiumicino airport from Sao Paulo in Brazil, hoping to throw the full-blooded Italian security staff off the scent. Unfortunately her extra-large bosom and derriere managed to attract the glances of airport customs agents, Italian news agency ANSA reported, but not for the reasons she had hoped. She also flubbed her answers to questions about the reasons for her trip. Two female investigators conducted a strip search and found the white powder stashed inside her unusual underwear. She was arrested for attempting to smuggle around 5.5 pounds of cocaine.

There is, however, a broad network of people who buy medications containing pseudoephedrine and sell it to the cooks, a practice called smurfing, Whitney says. In the past three years or so, young heroin users have begun smurfing to make money so they can buy heroin. A box of Sudafed that costs $8 or $9, he says, can be sold to meth cooks for $100, which is enough for 10 small heroin doses. Whitney expects almost 30 heroin overdose deaths this year in this county of 219,000. Law enforcement officials began tracking another trend in 2007 that made busting meth cooks even more difficult: a “one pot” method. The drug is mixed in a 2-liter soda bottle, often in moving cars. When the process is complete, the leftover toxic materials are tossed out the car window.

We know that air pollution in the form of traffic and factory fumes can pose a health risk ě°˝€“ but airborne traces of illegal drugs could do too, say researchers. Scientists at the Institute of Atmospheric Pollution Research in Rome found traces of cocaine and cannabis in the air around dozens of sites in Italy. They also discovered statistical correlations between cocaine levels and certain types of cancer ě°˝€“ and between cannabis levels and mental disorders.

The Blue Ridge school board will consider implementing random drug testing as a way to keep students from making “unhealthy choices.” A policy could be adopted as soon as Jan. 18. The board meets at 6 Wednesday night to discuss proposed building construction; the regular meeting follows at 7 at the high school library, 411 N. John St. The drug test option arose after discussion about use and misuse of legal and illegal drugs in the area. “The behaviors were alarming enough, it was clear that some students were making unhealthy choices, and it had to be addressed,” said Superintendent Susan Wilson. The goal is to prevent drug use; give students an “out” when friends try to get them to use substances; and give parents the information needed to seek treatment for their child if they test positive, she said.

Deputies returned two pounds of seized cannabis to a California dispensary on Friday after a court ruled that the marijuana had been improperly confiscated. The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department confiscated two pounds of marijuana from Common Roots Collective during a shakedown, I mean “inspection, on December 1. But the dispensary’s lawyer argued that the deputies violated federal law, since authorities, including code enforcement officers, had entered the property on an inspection order and not a search warrant, reports CBS 13.

✪ Disgraced Bishop Lahey apologizes for his Internet porn addiction

Earlier in the day, prosecutor David Elhadad laid out in lurid detail some of what was depicted in the images, videos and stories seized by police. Elhadad said Catholic imagery was intertwined with “disgusting” sado-masochistic scenes, including one image of a male in “monk’s garb” using a paddle to spank a young boy. Elhadad argued Lahey’s position in the Catholic Church placed him in a position of trust. “He is and was an individual in a position of trust over many years hiding his shameful sexual depravity and predilection in taking joy in the torture and rape of children,” said Elhadad.

Breathable caffeine dispensed from canisters that fit in jean pockets and are allowed in carry-on luggage is a ‘club drug’ that may be dangerous to teenagers, a New York senator said. Democrat Charles Schumer wrote Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg today asking her to review the safety and legality of the AeroShot Pure Energy caffeine inhaler, a yellow and gray canister of caffeine powder and B vitamins resembling a tube of lipstick. The inhaler is set to hit store shelves in New York and Boston next month 2 Comments Weigh InCorrections? inShare AeroShot will be sold over the counter with no age restrictions and is touted for its convenience and zero calories. If taken with alcohol, the mixture may have effects similar to caffeinated alcohol drinks tied to hospitalizations in the past, Schumer said. Doctors say it may carry neurological and cardiovascular risks.

Ardente was suspended from her job at a Quebec City-area high school in March after a student spotted her in a porn video on the Internet. While she didn’t deal with students in her job, the spicy contents of her videos turned her into quite the celebrity among them. School board officials fired Ardente after they were unable to reach agreement on her transfer to another job. They acknowledged Ardente hadn’t done anything illegal but said her cinematic activities don’t correspond with the values being taught at the school. Ardente had initially offered to put an end to her pornography career but said the board also wanted to impose working conditions that she felt would be too restrictive. After filing a grievance she eventually reached an out-of-court settlement with her employer.

“The manager said he was told people were hollering and arguing in another room,” Royals said. “When Hardiman made contact with the occupants of the room, he noticed the toilet kept running. When he went to check, he found a 20-ounce Coke bottle and a tin containing marijuana inside the tank, which caused it to keep running.”

If you thought buying an island was a costly affair, look no further than this new shirt, which costs twice as much as an island in Panama. From a distance, the five-million-rupee shirt ($97,500) looks fairly modest, but a closer look reveals that its buttons are diamonds set on gold.

Senior Class Fabricates Existence of Korean “Artist,” Cons Stuart Collection into Hanging House Off Edge of Seven-Story Building Stuart Collection Curator Attempts to Save Face: “Actually, joke’s on them: this prank is so genius that it ascends to the level of art. We’re proud to feature it in our collection.”

One four-hour tour costs $30 and takes tourists to Escobar’s grave, the house where he was shot dead by police and a home in the hills where he lived before his death. There the tourists meet Roberto Escobar, Pablo’s slight and balding older brother. The tours pose a conundrum for Colombia and Medellín, which have worked hard to reduce violence and shed their image as a land of gun-wielding cocaine smugglers. Tourism to Colombia is up 54% to nearly two million annual visitors compared to 2006, the government says. The country’s current tourism campaign says the only “danger” in visiting is falling in love with the country and not wanting to leave. “We knew we couldn’t just outlaw the tours,” says Medellín’s deputy secretary of tourism, Madeleine Torres. “But we feared the tours would promote the very thing we’re trying to move away from the connection people so often make between Colombia and cocaine.”

The French village of Allouville-Bellefosse is famous for the Chêne Chapelle (Oak Chapel), which is literally a chapel built into an oak tree. The amazing architecture consists of a wooden staircase spiraling around the ancient tree, leading up to a couple of chambers. These rooms have always been used as places of worship, by the village locals. The age of the tree has been a subject of debate, but everyone agrees that it is the oldest tree in France, without a doubt. The tree is known to have been growing as far back as the thirteenth century, during the rule of Louis IX, when France was a truly centralized kingdom. It is also known to have survived the Hundred Years War against the English, the Black Death, the Reformation, and Napoleon’s rule. Local folklore dates it a 1,000 years old, when it is said that the acorn took root. However, tree experts say it could only be around 800 years old, which means the thirteenth century saw it’s origins.

But with devil’s weed, you really are so removed from reality, that the possibility of doing yourself a fatal mischief is all too real. Here’s what the US Department of Agriculture says: “Datura intoxication typically produces a complete inability to differentiate reality from fantasy (delirium, as contrasted to hallucination); hyperthermia; tachycardia (increased heart-rate); bizarre, and possibly violent behavior; and severe mydriasis (pupil dilation) with resultant painful photophobia that can last several days.” It has high enough levels of toxicity that it can also kill you if you’re not careful about the dosage.

Timothy Leary, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Dodge City, Mystic Arts World, and a Laguna Beach history some would prefer to forget.

The Meridian communications satellite failed to reach orbit yesterday due to a failure with its Soyuz rocket, in the latest setback for a Russian space program which has now lost over half a dozen satellites in the past year. Its fragments crashed into the Novosibirsk region of central Siberia and were found in the Ordynsk district around 100km south of the regional capital Novosibirsk. “A sphere was found, around 50cm in diameter, which crashed into the roof of a house in the village of Vagaitsevo” in the Ordynsk district, an official in the local security services told the Interfax news agency. In an extraordinary irony, the official said that the house was located on Cosmonaut Street, named after the heroic spacemen of the Soviet and Russian space program.

In Amazonian Peru, the author traces the source of the powerful Stone Age botanical hallucinogen ayahuasca. He meets crying shamans, drunken shamans, and even a gringo shaman, and learns about the epic quest it inspired in one devotee. Then he takes the ultimate step: drinking it himself. Whoa. . .

The United States adding Iran to the list of countries likely to be responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks is “beyond belief,” an analyst tells Press TV. His comments come as a New York judge has signed a default judgment excluding Saudi Arabia from the list of defendants, but finding Iran, along with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, liable in the Sept. 11, 2001 incident. “The official story of 9/11 is taking on a life of its own, how Judge George Daniels could find this in the court is beyond belief, and it indicates that the rule of law is breaking down even further in the United States,” said Joshua Blakeney of the Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Veterans Today.

Representatives from the global intelligence company Stratfor awoke to find a lump of coal in their stockings this morning …or, more specifically, their clients’ credit card information strewn across the Web. It’s the latest cyber-attack being claimed by members of the hacktivist group Anonymous, one that allegedly resulted in the publishing of nearly 4,000 credit card numbers, site passwords, and home addresses for some of the (formerly) confidential clients of the U.S.-based security firm. The goal? The attackers indicated they were planning to use the stolen credit card information (allegedly stored as unencrypted text) to amass a sum of one million dollars that could then be given to various charities for the holiday season. Images posted alongside the hack’s alleged Pastebin-based press release show that some of these charity donations are already underway.

It was supposed to be a “slice of Americana and of childhood dreams,” says U.S. Army Specialist Mark Grapin, who lives in Fairfax County, Virginia. He’s talking about the treehouse he built for his two sons after returning from his latest tour of duty in Iraq. What Grapin didn’t expect was that Fairfax County’s zoning board would demand he tear down the treehouse after an anonymous complaint, thus launching the family into an eight-month legal battle. Grapin went to the local media for help and public outcry turned into an online petition. A neighbor donated trees to cover the treehouse, and the family even received a pro bono lawyer to help win over board members. Just days before the treehouse was to be torn down, Grapin was able to convince the board to let him keep it on the condition it be removed after five years. Plenty of time, he says, for his sons to enjoy it.

A series of security incidents had created an avalanche of bad press, which in turn undermined public confidence in the currency. Its value fell by more than 90 percent against the dollar. We thought Bitcoin’s value would continue to collapse, but so far that hasn’t happened. Instead, after hitting a low of $2, it rose back above $3 in early December, and on Monday it rose above $4 for the first time in two months. It’s impossible to predict where the currency will go next, but at a minimum it looks like the currency will still be around in 2012. This presents a bit of a puzzle for Bitcoin skeptics. The original run-up in prices could easily be explained as a speculative bubble, and the subsequent decline as the popping of that bubble. But if that were the whole story, then the value of Bitcoins should have continued to decline as more and more people lost confidence in the currency. That hasn’t been happening.

The patois Bible represents a bold new attempt to standardise the language, with the historically oral tongue written down in a new phonetic form. For example the passage relating the angel’s visit to Mary reads: “Di ienjel go tu Mieri an se tu ar se, ‘Mieri, mi av nyuuz we a go mek yu wel api. Gad riili riili bles yu an im a waak wid yu all di taim.”

“Effects were mostly concentrated in kidney and liver function, the two major diet detoxification organs, but in detail differed with each GM type. In addition, some effects on heart, adrenal, spleen and blood cells were also frequently noted. As there normally exists sex differences in liver and kidney metabolism, the highly statistically significant disturbances in the function of these organs, seen between male and female rats, cannot be dismissed as biologically insignificant as has been proposed by others. We therefore conclude that our data strongly suggests that these GM maize varieties induce a state of hepatorenal toxicity….These substances have never before been an integral part of the human or animal diet and therefore their health consequences for those who consume them, especially over long time periods are currently unknown.”

✪ HSBC: The World’s Dirtiest Bank

In late July, First Niagara Financial Group announced that it would buy 195 retail bank branches in New York and Connecticut from HSBC for around $1 billion. [1] HSBC acquired the branches when it bought the spooky Marine Midland in 1980. According to Global Finance, the UK-headquartered HSBC Holdings is the world’s 3rd largest bank with $2.36 trillion in assets. [2] Formerly known as Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corporation, HSBC has served as the world’s #1 drug money laundry since its inception as a repository for British Crown opium proceeds accrued during the Chinese Opium Wars. During the Vietnam War HSBC laundered CIA heroin proceeds.

There is something truly disturbing about a society that seeks to control the behavior of schoolchildren through fear and violence, a tactic that harkens back to an era of paddle-bruised behinds and ruler-slapped wrists. Yet, some American school districts are pushing the boundaries of corporal punishment even further with the use of Tasers against unruly schoolchildren. The deployment of Tasers against “problem” students coincides with the introduction of police officers on school campuses, also known as School Resource Officers (SROs). According to the Los Angeles Times, as of 2009, the number of SROs carrying Tasers was well over 4,000.

Domain registrar Go Daddy lost over 21,000 domains yesterday. It could be a coincidence–or it could be the result of the company’s p.r. debacle over its support for the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Finnish authorities have confirmed the seizure of 69 Patriot missiles manufactured by Raytheon Corporation today. During a routine search of the MS Thor Liberty, a ship flagged by the Isle of Man, at the Finnish port of Kotka, authorities found 69 Patriot missiles of a type capable of intercepting ICBMs, the most modern available and America’s most sensitive military technology.?log=out

Dany Lacerte is one example. The young Quebec City father started a Facebook page to track and expose suspected online predators. He joined a popular online meeting site and created a fake profile of a 13-year-old girl. He said he catches about five men a day and tries to film them over an Internet video-chat site. However, he didn’t blur the faces of the men he allegedly caught before posting videos of them online. He has been threatened with a lawsuit from one of the men he filmed. Earlier this year, a group of teens dressed as superheroes are gaining notoriety for a series of videos they posted in which they confront alleged pedophiles in Chilliwack, B.C. In a spin-off of Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator, the boys pose as teen girls in chats with men looking for sex, then arranged to meet the men at fast-food restaurants in the city.

For me, the charm of Facebook ended when my list of favorite books disappeared. The astonishing thing about the original lists of favorite things on Facebook was that you could instantly see anyone else in the Facebook land who was interested in anything on your own list. It was so surprising to discover this. Really popular things would show tens of thousands of devotees, but so many times, there would be just ten, or 100, or even two. Once in a while it would be a friend, or a friend of a friend, who shared a hitherto unknown and unsuspected taste for The Lost Scrapbook or the solo works of Yukihiro Takahashi. A magical thing. I friended a couple of complete strangers just because they were fellow Thurber freaks. These connections were random, unmonetized, unmediated. We can still do this on the Internet now-on Twitter, say, the new home of random and improbable connections-but not on Facebook. Not any more.

Occupy Wall Street may still be working to shake the notion it represents a passing outburst of rage, but some establishment institutions have already decided the movement’s artifacts are worthy of historic preservation. More than a half-dozen major museums and organizations from the Smithsonian Institution to the New-York Historical Society have been avidly collecting materials produced by the Occupy movement. Staffers have been sent to occupied parks to rummage for buttons, signs, posters and documents. Websites and tweets have been archived for digital eternity. And museums have approached individual protesters directly to obtain posters and other ephemera. The Museum of the City of New York is planning an exhibition on Occupy for next month. “Occupy is sexy,” said Ben Alexander, who is head of special collections and archives at Queens College in New York, which has been collecting Occupy materials. “It sounds hip. A lot of people want to be associated with it.” Thanks Jasmine

✪ The Apple Collection, 1986/87 – Catalog of Weird Apple Products

Why humans (and most primates, some bats, and elephant shrews) menstruate is a question that many have attempted to answer in some way… some explanations more convincing than others. The downsides to menstruation (the process of shedding the endometrium of the uterus that was built up in anticipation of the possibility of the implantation of a fertilized egg); “throwing away a substantial amount of blood and tissue,” “leaving a blood trail or filling a delicate orifice with dying tissue” in a “world full of predators and disease,” not to mention the menstrual cycle’s “uncomfortable, awkward, and sometimes debilitating” symptoms; seem to necessitate a strong explanation for the evolution of the feature. Not only is it hard to find a theory that explains why just a few mammals find it more evolutionarily advantageous to menstruate, it’s difficult to come up with a theory that explains why all those other mammals haven’t found it more efficient as well.

As the year draws to a close, EFF is looking back at the major trends influencing digital rights in 2011 and discussing where we are in the fight for a free expression, innovation, fair use, and privacy. The government has been using its secrecy system in absurd ways for decades, but 2011 was particularly egregious. Here are a few examples

From Fox 13 in Tampa comes the horrifying story of Nick Christie, a 62-year-old Ohio man who was detained by the Lee County Sheriff’s Office for being publicly intoxicated. While Christie’s wife asked that he be taken to the hospital, Lee County cops decided instead to strip Christie naked, tie him to a chair, cover his face, and then pepper spray him repeatedly, until he died

The disbelief over unruly crowds fighting and being pepper sprayed over Air Jordan Concords turned to mourning when it was reported on social media and blogs that a young man, 18-year-old Tyreek Amir Jacobs, had been killed for the coveted shoes. As the rumors put it, Jacobs was a teen from Washington DC and killed in Maryland, possibly at the Wheaton Mall. A photo of him was passed around, inscribed with his date of birth and date of death. But calls to police revealed there had been no killings under such circumstances in the DC, Maryland and Virginia area. “Nothing like that has happened here, and I hope we would know,” said one Montgomery County police official. While media outlets in the district reported on disturbances around the area, none ended fatally. Still, as of this writing, some 12,000 people were participating in no less than eight Facebook groups about Jacobs’ killing.

✪ Unprovoked attacks at heart of ‘Knockout King’

Matthew Quain still struggles to piece together what happened after a trip to the grocery store nearly turned deadly. He remembers a group of loitering young people, a dimly lit street – then nothing. The next thing he knew he was waking up with blood pouring out of his head. The 51-year-old pizza kitchen worker’s surreal experience happened just before midnight earlier this year, when he became another victim of what is generally known as “Knockout King” or simply “Knock Out,” a so-called game of unprovoked violence that targets random victims.

A top Duma political leader caused shock waves in a recent television interview when he warned that Russia could deploy an arsenal of new technology to destroy any part of the planet and kill over a hundred million people using secret weather weapons if the United States, the UN or Georgia tried to stop Russias entry into the WTO. Vladimir Zhirinovsky is Vice-Chairman of the Russian State Duma and leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), the first officially sanctioned opposition party after the fall of communism. The LDPR has deep links with the former KGB and Communist Party and has become a significant force in Russian politics, despite Zhirinovsky himself being branded as a militant neo-fascist.